I understand the cynicism in a lot of the comments here about it being impossible to compete against existing juggernaut systems, ridiculous 500k servers for small group practices, and even the bits about nobody caring enough to fix it.
I've been in Health IT for something like a dozen years, and it's true that it can be a serious pain in the ass. At Elation I think we're doing the right things to turn the tide. We're selling a really amazing clinically focused EMR system to physicians (not to their C-level hospital administrators), and so far they love it.
There's a ton to do and we're a tiny team. If this problem resonates with you please do get in touch. It's easy to find folks that want to work on dropbox or the next YC Airbnb-for-X but not as trivial to find folks thrlled (or crazy enough?) to tackle the mission we're on. My contact information is in my profile.
Apologies for the plug, seemed appropriate enough to be warranted.
FTA: "why wasn’t the EHR already doing the legwork, displaying these potentially pertinent correlations and data points, painting a more descriptive clinical picture, instead of leaving me to wade through mounds of information?"
Because the focus of the EHR system is about billing and tracking medical record treatment for hospital administrators (auditing) rather than enhancing clinical treatment and understanding for MDs?
Probably a large opportunity here to do cool and better GUI and visualization, but good luck getting past the EHR vendor guard dogs to even read-only access the back-end data.
I've had first hand experience with this. If you're going to build a startup in this area it is important to be a stealth mode as possible. It's also important to have a budget for legal services and LegalZoom™ won't cut it.
Then the lack of incentives/competitors allows them to stagnate while other industries constantly iterate platforms against each other to the benefit of society.
There's no reason why an EHR used by 100 employees needs a $500K Dell server to run, doesn't support load balancing (but needs it, since the app can't handle more than 40 users, so you need a bunch of VMs on that server) and uses up hundreds of gigs in the database (wikipedia is like, what, 50gb uncompressed...?)
They suck, there's a market.
"Much if not all of the current talk around clinical software unfortunately stops at electronic health records (EHR) – the paper chart (with all its limitations) mirrored in various incarnations of ‘the cloud’ (with the additional disadvantage of confidentiality rot). For all the endless effort put into EHR, it was a problem solved long ago with nothing more than punched-card-fed mainframes. All we are seeing now is the iterative pursuit of competing data interchange platforms."
"Physicians and researchers need software that advances the goal of making routine things routine beyond just the level of data storage and retrieval…to decision support, data discovery and visualization, unsupervised ontology construction, and scripting of reasoning agents."
Better design will save lives, and EHR sucks.
1 is true, 2 is true but nobody cares enough to fix it.
You cannot begin to imagine the amount of fuckheadedry on parade in any hospital by the combined egos and efforts of doctors, administrators, and computer janitors.
